efaardvark

I was told once that I was like Hatake Kakashi. I haven't seen enough Naruto to know if that is good or bad though. If I were to pick for myself, personality-wise I'd probably pick a character like Houtarou from Hyouka. "Low energy" is totally me, though I can get things done when suitably provoked. https://myanimelist.net/character/55131/Houtarou_Oreki Can't think of a good visual character offhand tho. I'm middling tall (5'10"/178cm), hiker build, long dark hair in back w/dark mustache and white beard.

Yeah, crunchy has both dub and sub on that one. After comparing I'd have to agree. I think the dub might have been re-done at some point though. I remember it being even more painful when I first saw it back in VHS days. Maybe I'm just more tolerant these days.

Re:Zero

了解, に佐！　 Hope you enjoy your stay here, but don't waste ALL your time here. I mean, there's all that anime to watch, right? (And games to play, and books to read, and ....)

I kind of agree. Not a lot of great ones lately, at least that I've seen. There have been some however. I've got plenty of backlog too, and there's a number of greats available on various streaming sites if I somehow manage to get through that. Sometimes I'll even spend an afternoon revisiting something random for oddball reasons of my own. I recently streamed HanaSaku just to focus on the gorgeous background artwork for instance. If all else fails there's always Crunchy's "random" button. Always something out there to watch.

Just finished Sacred Blacksmith.. https://anilist.co/anime/5940/SeikennoBlacksmith Kind of meh. Not bad but... Now I'm working on Chobits.. https://anilist.co/anime/59/Chobits I'd started it long ago but never finished it. Recently had a chance to borrow a DVD so why not? It's interesting to see it again after all these years.

I loved the original Xenoblade on the Wii. One of these days I'm going to have to get Dolphin running on my linux box just so I can play this game again. Now this tune is going to be stuck in my head again for the whole weekend.

I don't see how Netflix could ever establish a dynamic that would produce good anime at the volume necessary to also be good for a significant amount of profit for a company the size of Netflix. As a publicly-traded, US company they HAVE to put shareholder value (i.e. profits) first. A much smaller, anime-only company might be able to focus on producing good anime - especially if it were non-US or privately held and the owners were actually interested in doing it. But I just can't see a company like Netflix pulling it off.

(Kinda meh on the anime, but it does have some good tracks.)

I was born in Santa Monica, California (so west coast USA). After moving several times - once as far as Huntsville, Alabama - I've now settled down in ... sunny southern California once again. Now I'm in the foothills north of Los Angeles about 30 miles from where I was born. Some nice hiking around here, at least when the hills aren't on fire... (more pics from my fb page)

It is highly variable for me. I'm a binge-watcher so usually wait and watch a whole series at once, or at least over a couple days. (I prefer the 12- or 24-episode format, so usually 1 anime = an afternoon's entertainment.) In between it depends on other priorities. Sometimes I'll go for weeks without watching any anime at all. Sometimes I'll spend a whole weekend doing nothing but watching anime, eating, and sleeping. This is me too. I'm a big reader, play games, and have my own computer programming or electronics projects to distract me as well.

If we're restricting ourselves to the 3 realms in the anime (SAO/Aincrad, ALO/Alfheim, or GGO) then I think I prefer Aincrad. Providing they re-enable the "log out" menu item of course. Gun Gale was too much like PvP/arena combat & I've never really liked that sort of thing. Aincrad was a long-term campaign, which I like. It was also "real" in the sense that people were playing a single-life player (no respawns, reincarnation, or re-rolling), which is kind of appealing as well. The spell system in Alfheim was interesting, as was the flight aspect, but the whole thing was just a fake front. (Which was extremely annoying to my gamer instincts btw.) Maybe if they did it over and made the Oberon quest real I'd be more inclined to like it, but even then I think I'd still like Aincrad better. To me it just felt like Aincrad would have had more depth of play for groups/guilds of players to cooperate. The whole thing of successively unlocking, exploring, and ultimately beating all 100 levels with your guildmates is very appealing to me. Alfheim, OTOH, seemed more "gimmicky", lacked depth, and was more geared towards the PvP side of things, none of which I'm a fan of.

Happy birthday.

Sora no Manimani An older one but kind of silly/fun.

Yes, I code. I know C, a bit of C++, Perl, and enough java, python, and lisp to be dangerous. Back in the dim, dark, early days of my career I also learned 8080 and 6502 assembly for systems-level programming, but I think those brain cells have mostly died or moved on to other things by now. They made me take Fortran in college, but I never really used it outside of class. I also know BASIC from my Apple days. Haven't used that in mumbedecadesmumble either. I know enough HTML to code up a page in a text editor, and enough CGI and SQL to do interesting stuff with a database on the back-end, as long as we're not talking 1000s of transactions per second. PHP I've played with, and if performance were an issue I'd probably use that, but mostly I stick with perl for CGI stuff since I already have a lot of experience with that. I've also dabbled in Lua and C#, though I can't say I know either one very well. Likewise I've looked into Objective-C and Swift, but haven't done anything much beyond "hello world" with either one. Honestly, I've always been the engineer/tech guy who like to mess around under the hood. At this point I'd be ok with tackling pretty much any language. My main go-to languages are C and Perl though. If I'm coding something from scratch I'll usually prototype it in Perl, then move to C if I need performance. I did use 6502 assembly to make a couple game-ish things on an Apple ][ once upon a time. One was a kind of side-scroller with a missile-launching helicopter and not a lot of backstory or plot. Eventually I took out the scrolling, added a "star" to the center, started calling the choppers "spaceships", and turned it into a sort of Spacewar clone or physics simulation. The other was a flight/space simulator of sorts. Using a 3d library and a RA/declination/distance table from a star almanac I input the locations of a couple hundred (real) stars and let you fly around in them using a joystick. I was in jr high/middle school at the time so no commercial intentions in either case, but I had fun. I'm into electronics and currently I use arduinos a lot, so mainly C there. I'm also not above getting in and modifying other people's code for the software I use and most of that's in C as well. (Open-source rules!) My favorite game at the moment is Kerbal Space Program, which uses the unity engine, so that's my (limited) C# experience. At work I use mainly perl, but sometimes C or C++ there too. I also manage a mySQL database for production (and metrics for the boss of course) so I'm somewhat proficient in SQL. I'm in realtime operations though, not software dev, so a lot of times I don't have the luxury of a full design/coding/debug cycle. I need something that works, quickly, and it doesn't have to look nice. As long as the patch holds things together until the real software devs can get a fix in the next software release I'm happy. (Though that said, I'm still maintaining software that I wrote 10 or 15 years ago too. Some of it is even being shown to the public! Fortunately nobody but me sees the code or I'd probably have to consider seppuku.) A lot of my day-to-day work is system monitor and control stuff. Status or metrics from a cron job pushed to a database, with a program for the human controllers pulling the data out and putting it on a GUI, flashing red or yellow as necessary. That kind of thing. Perl (and CPAN modules) is good for all that.. CGI, SQL with the DBI stuff, reports, logging (& parsing logs), GUI stuff with Perl::Tk, XML with one of the XML modules, etc. I also spend a lot of time in c-shell and bash on unix/linux and perl is a good fit for that environment as well.

Not sure but it could be Mekakucity Actors. I haven't watched that anime all the way through but the fragment in the video you posted seems to have a similar style and I think I recognize the characters. Really hard to tell from just that bit though.

I like Crunchy. If you're into dubs you're probably still better going with funimation though. Crunchy has some dubs, but they're still the minority. Or maybe vrv? I don't know anyone who has tried vrv yet, but it apparently gives you access to both crunchy and funi, as well as some others. (I think you still need to be in the US tho.)

Naruto is pretty long. Over 200 episodes if I recall. You might want to take a break every so often and watch another one. There's quite a number of good, 1-season animes that only have about a dozen episodes that you can binge in an afternoon.

I had the same reaction. I enjoyed the anime, but... weird. I must have muttered variations of, "this is nuts" at least a couple times per episode. I loved the, ah, reimagining of the various nationalities, and the reenactment(?) of the various historic battles. Somebody did some homework, then .. went off on a tangent. Genius or madness? Hard to say. I think my favorite bit was the little white flags, and the little "pop" noise they made.

Would things like Gosick or Rozen Maiden be acceptable?

I think the first real Japanese anime I can for-sure remember seeing at least parts of was Tranzor Z, which was the Americanized version of Mazinger Z. Might have been others before that, but I can't remember details or names. (I was maybe 10yo at the time.) I didn't see all of Tranzor though. I only found it because it was on at around the same time as Space Angel, another (non-Japanese) animated show I was interested in at the time. The first anime I remember watching all the way through with any real interest was Star Blazers. (Americanized Uchū Senkan Yamato, or Space Battleship Yamato.)